David M Williams
Monday, 09 November 2009 17:51
Opinion and Analysis
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Can the US Government see open source as a viable platform driving its web sites? Yes it can!
President Obama’s administration re-launched its primary portal, WhiteHouse.gov, as October closed. For the majority of visitors the site is informative and accessible.
Those with a geekier bent looked under the surface and noted with interest that popular open source content management system (CMS) had been employed to drive the site, dynamically rendering it from regularly updated material stored within a database.
This change was possibly hinted at by the Government’s prior use of Drupal back in February, powering its Democracy 2.0 web site Recovery.gov. Previously the most prominent Drupal site was The Onion.
This was a landmark event for open source advocates, long pushing for Government recognition of free software as a means of stretching budgets and ensuring electronic data remains accessible many years and decades after the applications which created it have been superseded.
Obama’s new media team next turned their sites to the most public electronic face of the White House, driven by a desire to more quickly, easily and gracefully implement their vision of what interactive government should be.
The team conceived of frequently updated rich content like video clips as well as expected material like transcripts of speeches. They imagined opportunities for voter feedback through polls and even forums.
An investigation into possible CMSs turned up Drupal as the best option to fulfil these concepts and desires.
Yet, not all are smitten by the idea of having an important web site built on top of program code which anyone can see.
One of the primary features of open source software is that its program code is freely available, unlike, say, Microsoft Word. This means well-intentioned technically-capable users of the software can track down bugs and actually fix them by themself, hopefully submitting their revision back to the software’s maintainers for everyone else’s benefit.
Of course, this also means people with malicious intent can study the program code and look for vulnerabilities. Luke Skywalker would not have destroyed the Death Star had the Rebels not been able to study its blueprints and discover a weakness.
